Moscow Journal; A Poet Sings Fondly of an Old Enemy

By SERGE SCHMEMANN,

Published: July 24, 1993

MOSCOW, July 23—
Opening the program, Culture Minister Yevgeny Sidorov scanned the overflowing Concert Hall of the Rossiya Hotel with unfeigned delight and said, "Look at that, a full house, just like the 60's!"

A bemused murmur spread through the audience, most of them people of the Sixties with graying beards and the stern, unfashionable clothes of the pre-glasnost intelligentsia, and it turned to applause when Yevgeny Yevtushenko walked out.

He was still lanky and boyish, still outrageous in his brown silk suit. And as he launched into his most famous verses in his familiar, dramatic delivery, many a contemporary mouthed the familiar words and nodded to old memories. The younger among them listened for echoes of a noble era that to them was already history.

The evening was dedicated to Mr. Yevtushenko's 60th birthday on July 18, but it was really a testimonial to the poets of the 1960's, the defiant young Soviet writers who first broke through the shroud of Stalinism and electrified their battered, cowed nation with the unchained power of their verse. Voice of Siberia

Mr. Yevtushenko was the most celebrated voice of the "thaw," a brash, a 6-foot-3 Siberian with raw energy, a penchant for self-promotion and a twinkle in his eye, a newcomer to the inbred Moscow intelligentsia.

"Today you, one of the initiators of the Sixties movement, turn 60," President Boris N. Yeltsin wrote in a congratulatory letter read out by his chief of staff, Sergei Filatov.

"Your innate, multifaceted talent arose brightly in the now-distant years of the 'thaw.' The civic consciousness of young poets then played a huge role in the spiritual liberation and awakening of the people of Russia."

A gray-haired woman agreed, saying: "He was a symbol for us then. Later he was attacked for not being exiled or sent to the camps, for making a career of protest. But not many of us had the courage to stand up to the regime, and he did. You can't blame him that he survived." Poetry and Book-Signing

At the end of the evening, hundreds lined up to get Mr. Yevtushenko's autograph on his latest book of verse, "No Years" -- much of it about aging.

Nostalgia was in the air, but also the painful question that rises in any gathering of the "Shestidesyatniki" -- the "Sixtiers," as the aging rebels are now styled: Was this the Russia that they fought for?

It was a question Mr. Yevtushenko raised when he declaimed his celebrated poem on the survival of the spirit of Stalinism, "The Heirs of Stalin."

"I with these verses had lost their relevance," he said. "But that, unfortunately, is not so." Striking a Raw Nerve

And when he read a more recent poem in which he voices troubled, ambivalent sentiments about the collapse of the Soviet state, "Goodbye, our Red Flag," the passionate applause testified to the feelings he touched. Goodbye our Red Flag. You were our brother and our enemy. You were a soldier's comrade in trenches, you were the hope of all captive Europe, But like a Red curtain you concealed behind you the Gulag stuffed with frozen dead bodies. Why did you do it, our Red Flag?

That counterpoint of nostalgia, triumph and remorse wound through the evening. This was the first time in five years, Mr. Yevtushenko noted with rue, that Russians had packed a hall to hear poetry.

"They tell us Russians do not love poetry anymore, they try to hypnotize us with pornography and cheap thrillers," he said. "But I see that this won't work." A Note of Bravado

It was a note of bravado that seemed to hearten the audience, intellectuals who had learned hope through the poetry of Mr. Yevtushenko and his comrades when their enemy was the state, but who now felt lost and humiliated in a new, unfamiliar world of fast money, fast food and fast literature.

At the outset of the evening, Mr. Filatov bestowed on Mr. Yevtushenko a medal as "Defender of Free Russia," given those who took part in resisting the hard-line Communist coup in August 1991.

Holding the medal aloft, Mr. Yevtushenko declared that it was the most meaningful of his many awards. But he also noted that many of the expectations raised by the defeat of the coup had been frustrated. "These difficult times are not worthy of our hopes," he said.

But then revolutions rarely prove worthy of the hopes of those who make them, in part because nothing that follows ever matches the glamour of rebellion. A Career of Rebellion

And rebellion was Mr. Yevtushenko's career.

He burst onto the stage in the cultural "thaw" that followed Stalin's death in 1953. He was expelled from university in 1956 for defending a banned novel. He refused to join in the official campaign against Boris Pasternak. He denounced the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, interceded with the K.G.B. chief, Yuri V. Andropov, on behalf of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and opposed the Soviet military sweep into Afghanistan in 1979.

But it was as the writer of ringing, defiant verse that Mr. Yevtushenko was best known. He and poets like Andrei Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina and Robert Rozhdestvensky rose to extroardinary stardom, filling whole soccer stadiums at home and attracting global attention as symbols of a youthful defiance.

But Mr. Yevtushenko stopped short of crossing the line between defiance and resistance, and he garnered a measure of official sanction that more daring dissidents later came to resent. While they suffered exile or labor camps, he was given state awards, regularly published and allowed to travel abroad. The exiled poet Joseph Brodsky once said of Mr. Yevtushenko, "He throws stones only in directions that are officially sanctioned and approved." Not Known for Modesty

But nobody ever accused him of lacking energy, nor, as he noted with a smile, of excessive modesty. As the years passed, Mr. Yevtushenko turned his hand to poetry, film-making, novels.

When the first rays of glasnost, or openness, were ushered in by Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Mr. Yevtushenko was among the first to leap on the bandwagon with a speech to the Writers' Union assailing censorship, distortion of history and privilege. He was elected to the first Supreme Soviet. And when the August 1991 coup began, he was quickly at Mr. Yeltsin's side.

But the victory over Communism also stripped his generation of the role they had so passionately sought through the long years of defiance -- the role of social prosecutor, of cultural arbiter. But it did not strip Mr. Yevtushenko, at least, of pride in the "Sixties Generation," the name of the poem with which he closed the evening. We were a fad for some, some we offended with our fame. But we set you free, you envious insulters. Let them hiss, that we are without talent, Sold out and hypocrites, It makes no difference. We are legendary, Spat upon, but immortal!

Photo: Yevgeny Yevtushenko reciting his poetry this week in Moscow in a program celebrating his 60th birthday. (Reuters for The New York Times)